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SuperGen UKCMER Grand Challenges

In the summers of 2011, 2012 and 2015 the SuperGen UK Centre for Marine Energy Research placed three £3 million research funding calls commissioning nationally leading researchers to investigate key questions for the present and future of marine energy. The first call, in 2011, concentrated on topics identified at the Workshop for the Accelerated Deployment of Marine Energy. The remit of the call was as follows:

Understanding extreme loading events and impact on devices and arrays.

The second Grand Challenges call, made in 2012, was intended to stimulate novel research that focussed on far term goals that could influence marine energy in 2050. The topics of interest were:

Novel, future, concepts for marine energy generation.

Marine energy generation in very deep water environments.

New materials for marine energy generation.

Very large array whole systems understanding; including:

Large and very large arrays,

cumulative large and very large arrays,

their impact on the marine environment,

the impact of environment on the arrays,

device performance within arrays

Instrumentation for extreme marine environments.

Resource prediction for very short timescales (hours)

Marine energy platforms; including:

adaptive control,

combined (multiple use),

multimodal systems,

modular systems.

Civil integration of GW scale marine energy generation.

The third call, made in 2015, had the following three priority remit areas, which were identified at a scoping workshop in October 2013 and were further refined (in consultation with UK marine energy champions):

Wave and Tidal Array Modelling

Novel Materials, Components and Sub-Systems

Increasing Survivability and Reliability

These three calls have led to the funding of 16 new research projects managed by the UKCMER hub. Each project is listed below, with links to view detailed descriptions of each project: